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    But as Andrew Pickering reveals in this beguiling book, a much more lively and experimental strain of cybernetics can be traced from the 1940s to the present.The Cybernetic Brain explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. Psychiatry, engineering, management, politics, music, architecture, education, tantric yoga, the Beats, and the sixties counterculture all come into play as Pickering follows the history of cybernetics’ impact on the world, from contemporary robotics and complexity theory to the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende. What underpins this fascinating history, Pickering contends, is a shared but unconventional vision of the world as ultimately unknowable, a place where genuine novelty is always emerging. And thus, Pickering avers, the history of cybernetics provides us with an imaginative model of open-ended experimentation in stark opposition to the modern urge to achieve domination over nature and each other.

    "The past is a foreign country," writes Stevenson. "By my analysis it's a bit like France-in that I've been to parts of it and eaten some nice food there. But the future? The future is an unknown territory-and there isn't a guidebook." Thus, his ambition was born. Stevenson set out simply, asking, "What's next?" and then traveled the globe in pursuit of the answers. Along the way, he visited the Australian outback to visit the farmers who can save us from climate change, met a robot with mood swings, and talked to the Spaniard who's putting a hotel in space. While some might be overwhelmed, or even dismayed by the looming realities of genome sequencing, synthetic biology, a nuclear renaissance, and carbon scrubbing, Stevenson remains, well, optimistic. Drawing on his singular humor and storytelling to break down these sometimes complicated discoveries, "An Optimist's Tour of the Future" paints a wonderfully readable, and completely enthralling portrait of where we'll be when we grow up- and why it's not so scary. Watch a Video

    This book offers a fresh, current translation (with detailed Coptic annotations) and ten chapters of introductory analysis of the text. Approaching the text from socio-historical, literary, and postmodern gender-theoretical frameworks, the editors situate Thunder as an early Christian text - away from the now suspect category of “Gnosticism” - and offer conclusions on its possible ancient meanings, as well as its interpretive possibilities for the present moment.

    Although the concept may seem revolutionary, it is an obvious solution to overcrowded metropolises. Most world cities are situated on the water and have too little space where it's most needed: in the city center. Building on water allows inner-city areas to expand.Floating buildings have many advantages. They are both flexible and mobile. A buoyant structure can be moved to make space for a new building, decreasing the need for the demolition of a development that still has a productive economic future. Floating buildings outwit changing water levels by rising and falling with the tide and, in so doing, promote a more responsible water management. They leave no scars on their sites, permitting planners to actively meet the demands of the moment.Floating buildings are not new. People of nearly every creed and culture have lived on houseboats since time immemorial. Using modern technologies borrowed from the offshore and shipping industries, architects and engineers can adapt existing construction methods for use in erecting large building complexes on water.It's up to the architects of the climate-change generation to respond to the world's spatial needs with smart, sustainable proposals. Float! will help them to do just that.Koen Olthuis is an architect at Waterstudio.NL.David Keuning is on the editorial staff of Mark: Another Architecture, a bimonthly journal on architecture. His website is davidkeuning.com

    Some people find that they reflect basic human values such as authenticity and integrity. For others, they are the very incarnation of German perfectionism. Braun is not merely a trademark; it stands for an all-encompassing concept.

    Pages: 53. Chapters: Transhumanism, Soul, Ray Kurzweil, Mind uploading, Fountain of Youth, Immortality in fiction, Aubrey de Grey, Turritopsis nutricula, Biological immortality, The Tale of Beren and Luthien. Excerpt: Transhumanism, often abbreviated as H+ or h+, is an international intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations, as well as study the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies. They predict that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings with such greatly expanded abilities as to merit the label "posthuman." Transhumanism is therefore viewed as a subset of philosophical "posthumanism." The contemporary meaning of the term "transhumanism" was foreshadowed by one of the first professors of futurology, FM-2030, who taught "new concepts of the Human" at The New School of New York City in the 1960s, when he began to identify people who adopt technologies, lifestyles and world views transitional to "posthumanity" as "transhuman." This hypothesis would lay the intellectual groundwork for British philosopher Max More to begin articulating the principles of transhumanism as a futurist philosophy in 1990, and organizing in California an intelligentsia that has since grown into the worldwide transhumanist movement. Influenced by some great works of science fiction, the transhumanist vision of a transformed future humanity has attracted many supporters and detractors from a wide range of perspectives. Transh...